Mugabe plans to stand down as Zimbabwe leader

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Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe says in a forthcoming interview that he will not stand for another term in office, although he has not chosen a successor.

The 80-year-old leader, who has ruled this southern African country for the past 24 years, told Britain's Sky News that he wanted to rest and to write.

Asked if he intended to stand for another term in office Mugabe said: "I don't think so, I also want to rest and do a bit of writing."

However, he admitted that he had not yet chosen a successor.

The lack of a successor could pose a serious problem to the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) should Mugabe step down, as none of his potential successors appears to enjoy popular support.

This is the first time Mugabe has said he will not stand for another election, although he hinted in an interview with a Kenyan newspaper last week that he was ready to retire.

In the wide-ranging interview, Mugabe also hit out at South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu as "evil" and defended his government's forecasts of a bumper harvest this year, despite gloomy estimates by aid agencies that millions of Zimbabweans will face famine.

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Around five million Zimbabweans, half of them in urban areas, are believed to require emergency food aid this year due to poor harvests, blamed partly on the country's controversial land reform programme.

Earlier this month the government cancelled a mission by the United Nations to assess the state of the food harvest, but an independent survey done in March estimated a potential shortfall of 850,000 tonnes of the staple maize.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has claimed that the ruling party wants to use scarce food reserves in order to buy votes ahead of next year's general elections, scheduled for March.

But Mugabe said in the interview that he stood by his government's crop forecast of 2.4 million tonnes of maize, saying that other countries needed food aid more than Zimbabwe.

"We are not hungry. It should go to hungrier people, hungrier countries than ourselves," Mugabe said.

"Why foist this food upon us? We don't want to be choked," he said.

Mugabe's government has come in for severe criticism from Western countries, as well as activists such as South Africa's Tutu, for alleged human rights and democratic abuses.

But Mugabe dismissed Tutu's criticism. "He is an angry, evil and embittered little bishop," he said.

He also defended his country's four-year-old land reform programme, which has seen white-owned farms seized for redistribution to landless blacks, claiming the white farmers were "ill-educated".

"The whites who were here were mere actor farmers, ill-educated and we brought in a system which is much more enlightened than the system they had," said Mugabe.

Race relations have hit a low in Zimbabwe, and Mugabe's government accuses the white minority, which makes up less than one per cent of the country's 11.6 million people, of backing the opposition.

Asked why he continued to play the race card, Mugabe said: "Because the whites are still contemptuous, they are still racist and we don't want that in our society."